TorrentFreak Email Update

Russia’s Facebook Prepares To Make Peace With USTR Over Piracy

Posted: 09 Mar 2014 12:50 AM PST

Every year the Special 301 Report identifies countries thought by the United States Trade Representative to pose the biggest intellectual property-related threats to U.S. companies. Russia has been a ‘priority’ country for some time, not least due to the actions of one of its biggest and most influential websites.

VKontakte (In Touch), is Russia’s Facebook. It’s a huge operation with tens of millions of users, each of whom has the ability to upload music, movies and TV shows to share with their friends. And with their friends’ friends. And with their friends’ friends’ friends.

Needless to say, entertainment companies aren’t pleased that this social networking giant is facilitating piracy on a grand scale, especially when that content – music in particular – goes on to fuel countless free MP3 download portals all around the Internet. If you’ve ever downloaded MP3s from the free web, chances are some of that music has come from VK.

For some time VK has been keen to update its image by making steps towards becoming more rightsholder-friendly. That said, it’s never really been enough for the U.S. and as a result Russia has again found itself on the latest Special 301 Report. But there signs that things could be getting more serious.

VK Executive Director Dmitry Sergeyev told ITAR-TASS yesterday that consultations between his company and rightsholders were underway, with a view to the signing of an anti-piracy memorandum with telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor.

As the government outfit at the center of Russia’s web-blocking mechanism, Roskomnadzor has significant power. Its anti-piracy memo deals with the pre-trial settlement of disputes between sites and copyright holders and requires signatories to implement content fingerprinting and identification systems in order to filter and block unauthorized material.

“VKontakte will introduce content identification, which will be used to monitor and promptly delete published content protected by copyright,” a source close to the company said.

“This will be the first step towards eliminating the social network from of the U.S. Trade Representative’s Special 301 Report, which is currently limiting the company’s ability to raise funds abroad and sign agreements with foreign rightsholders.”

Anti-piracy memorandum signatory the Russian Anti-Piracy Organization (RAPO) will be the messenger of progress. The group says it will monitor VK for pirate content in the months to come and if there is significant improvement, the MPAA will be informed.

"During this year, the industry will be observing what is happening to the sites, including VK.com,” RAPO chief Konstantin Zemchenkov said.

“If pirate content disappears from the social network, we'll report to the MPAA, which in turn will report that fact to the IIPA [International Intellectual Property Alliance], which will inform the US authorities.”

Since the Special 301 Report is based on the previous years’ data, even in the event of progress VK won’t be able to get off the list until 2015. The site has been included since 2011, so removal isn’t going to come easy. Other local sites, such as RUtracker.org and Rapidgator, remain on the list as thorns in the side of the U.S.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Popcorn Time: Open Source Torrent Streaming Netflix For Pirates

Posted: 08 Mar 2014 11:44 AM PST

popcorn-time Over the years BitTorrent has become fairly mainstream, with hundreds of millions of people using torrent clients to download the latest entertainment.

Despite its popularity the downloading process can be cumbersome at times, especially for novices. Faced with this challenge Sebastian, a designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina, decided to come up with a piece of software that would make the process as easy as Netflix.

“As a designer I love the challenge of simplification. Take something hard for the common user and make it usable. I have a lot of friends who don’t understand torrents and I wanted to make it easy and effortless to use torrent technology,” Sebastian tells us.

A few months of coding later “Popcorn Time” was born, a tool that allows users to stream popular movie torrents with the click of a button. Popcorn Time offers instant access to hundreds of films, in various qualities and complete with subtitles if needed.

Popcorn Time

What started out as an experiment for a group of friends soon developed into something much bigger. Popcorn Time now has 20 collaborators on Github and continues to expand at a rapid pace. Developers from all over the world have added new features and within 24 hours it was translated into six languages.

Sebastian explains that Popcorn Time uses node-webkit and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s basically a browser that users HTML, CSS and JavaScript to serve the movie streams.

“The technology behind the app is very simple. We consume a group of APIs, one for the torrents, another for the movie info, and another for the poster. We also have an API for the subtitles. Everything is automated, we don’t host anything, but take existing information and put it together,” Sebastian says

The torrent files all come from YTS (formerly YIFY), which has an API Popcorn Time taps into. The application can search this database and allows users to stream the torrent on demand. When finished the app will continue to share for a while after the download is finished, to avoid leeching.

Since Popcorn Time links to a lot of copyrighted movies, Hollywood is not going to be happy, but according to Sebastian the developers don’t expect any legal issues. They inform users that sharing copyrighted material is not allowed everywhere, and other than that they are just repackaging existing content, without a commercial angle.

“We don’t expect legal issues. We don’t host anything, and none of the developers makes any money. There are no ads, no premium accounts, and no subscription fees or anything like that. It’s an experiment to learn and share,” Sebastian notes.

All the people who work on the project are big movie fans themselves, and most have Netflix accounts. Sebastian believes that going to the cinema is the best way to experience a movie, but if people who want to enjoy a recent film at home they should be able to do so. This is often not the case, and that’s where Popcorn Time comes in.

“We hate that we don’t have the chance to watch some movies at home. Popcorn Time is an experiment to show that you can do something better for the users, and that you can do it with BitTorrent,” Sebastian says.

Popcorn Time is officially still in Beta, and will continue to improve in the weeks and month to come. However, one thing will never change, it will remain free and open source for as long as it exists.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.